Teaching Writing

How are we doing teaching writing?

Still some work to do, according to the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (The Nations Report Card)
Good news: 1998-2002 showed some improvement of writing skills
in grades 4-8
Bad news: no improvement for grade 12

Serious consequences of poor writing

Writing is thinking with a pencil
Writing is a premier way in which children think and express
their ideas
Writing is a way children express creativity, uniqueness, and
indicate what they want
Writing well and succinctly is increasingly important as
children
get older

Is there a best way to teach writing?

No consensus
Process is important
Children need a time, place, and reason to write
Good instruction is crucial
The key to children learning to write well is good instruction.

Elements of good instruction

An environment that supports writing (with space for
children to
write and the tools to do so)
Teachers who read with a writers eye (so they can point
out strategies that young writers used effectively)
Teachers who model good instruction (so children will see
how one goes about writing)
Lots of opportunities to practice, accompanied by corrective
feedback (praise the expressive aspect of the task, while
helping
the child form letters and write accurately and well)

Current challenges in the field

Schools of education need to offer pre-service teachers
experience in learning what good writing is, how to teach
writing,
and knowledge about the genres of writing (e.g., expository
vs. narrative writing )
Schools need a greater focus on evaluation, so we can
identify
good writing and support children as they develop their
skills

Techniques teachers can use

Morning message
Talk about what is happening in the class, providing an

opportunity for children to write about it

Say something really exciting or ask a thought-provoking question
about a timely issue or event (e.g., the upcoming election)

Describe this
Children want to learn, they are knowledge seekers. Provide

opportunities for children to absorb information and then write

Ask them to describe this and they will come up with
wonderful language and ideas

Innovations
Take a favorite text like Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
and create a new text using the same language model
Students integrate new words and make stories their own

Across the curriculum

Writing is important in every subject
In math, students can make their own math books and measure things
Field trips offer an opportunities to summarize and put words and
pictures together in interesting ways

In science, even at the pre-K level, lab notebooks allow children to

participate in an experiment and then write about what they observed

In all areas of the curriculum, give children the opportunity

to realize that writing is an expressive, meaningful act that
helps them learn about any subject.

Writing instruction before kindergarten

Example: A journal by a four-year-old in which she writes just
what
she wants to
The teacher captions each page with the childs words
Over time, the child begins to see the difference between what she is
writing and what the teacher is writing

This exercise provides the child with an opportunity to write, and

also an opportunity to learn from corrections

Writing in early childhood

Early on, children want to use writing to communicate ideas

In the very early years, provide children every opportunity
to write letters, recipes, lists, ideas
The writing may be unconventional, but it will convey the
idea that writing has a function and is very important

Writing is different than handwriting

Young children will dabble with a lot of interesting ways of
writing
Its important to focus on the meaning, on what theyre
trying to say
Composition and handwriting has a place in the early
childhood curriculum, but sometimes hand muscles are not
developed
enough to write very small letters.
Be encouraging and supportive!

Children with learning disabilities and writing

Kids who struggle with writing often have a hard time

learning informally or incidentally. For example, they dont
learn as much about spelling correctly just through reading
and/or writing.
Explicit teaching is vital for these children

A lot of kids who have learning difficulties also have

difficulties
with self-regulation of their thoughts or behaviors. Skilled
writing requires a lot of regulation planning, monitoring,
evaluating,
and revising

Children with learning disabilities and writing (cont.)

Some kids with learning problems often have an incomplete

or fragmented knowledge base. For example, if they dont
have knowledge of the story genre, then they are at a
disadvantage in constructing a good story

Another issue for kids with learning disabilities is

motivation. If you struggle with writing, its easy to develop
an intense dislike for it. And the longer that goes on, the
more difficult it is to deal with
Often, all these things are interconnected.

How parents can support writing

Help kids get their thoughts together and organize what

they
want to say
Plan an approach to the assignment
Dont just leave them to sit at the table and agonize; if they
seem stuck, help them get started

Mastering writing is a life-long process

Remember, writing is the most complicated language skill
that
any of us have to learn
Parents need to empathize with kids, knowing that they
work
very hard to accomplish their writing assignments

Front load the process

Have the child talk about what theyre going to write about
Write down the words they want to use but dont know how
to spell
Help them organize the main points that theyre writing
about
Review the goal of the assignment: know where youre
going and how youre going to get there
Plan something fun for afterwards.
Give a time limit; put the timer on and do the hard thing
first

VIDEO
Invented Spelling
Mary T. Murphy Elementary School, Branford, Connecticut

A first grade class makes a party list using invented spelling

The teacher works with students to see what their invented spelling
tells her about the students knowledge of word structure, speech
sounds, and how they use letters to represent those sounds

The teacher allows students to practice their phonemic awareness

abilities, while providing teachable moments about accurate
spelling

Spelling
Too often seen as the poor relation of language arts
instruction
Accurate spelling is a courtesy to the reader
Spelling knowledge is very closely associated with reading
comprehension. Spelling is a way of being word conscious,
which is associated with knowing word meaning and
comprehension which results in better writing
Those who spell well are more likely to write longer and
better structured compositions as they move into the higher
levels of
written expression

Invented spelling
Also called inventive spelling
Its a beneficial step for four- and five-year-olds who have
not yet entered into formal instruction
From kindergarten on, kids will learn spelling better and
faster if
they are taught it explicitly

Phonemic awareness and invented spelling

The best kindergarten writers have teachers who:

teach kids how to spell the highest-frequency words accurately rather
than relying on invented spelling, and

study the structure of words from a phonological (sound) and

orthographic (spelling) perspective

Invented spelling as diagnostic tool

If children can put together a logical representation for all of
the sounds in a word, it is very likely that they have good
word
decoding skills.
Being able to segment the sounds in a word and correlate
them
with letters is key to both decoding and spelling.

Teach kids directly how to

form the letters
identify the speech sounds
spell high-frequency and pattern-based words accurately

and they will write longer compositions with more

detail
and structure

Automatic operations of writing

Writing is like juggling a lot of balls in the air
If you have automatic mastery of some of the basics,
you can focus more attention on the demanding complex
reasoning skills

How to use invented spelling as a diagnostic tool

If a child writes the word bump as B U P
Thats pretty good inventive spelling for kindergarten. Leaving out

the M is understandable, because linguistically the mmm sound

disappears in the articulation of bump. A little more instruction is
needed to get that point across
But, if the child wrote P E P for the word bump, that would indicate
that that child was not segmenting the sounds in that word

A good inventive spelling of the word balloon might be B L

U N
But, by first grade, wed want to see the student break it into sounds
(ba ah la oo un) and know something about how each of
those sounds is typically spelled

Moving from invented writing to standard writing

You need a sequence of lessons thats planned out.
Dont leave it to chance
A

good writing program should encompass:

Time to develop the component skills
A fostering of fluency and accuracy with the component skills
Application of those skills to inventive, expressive writing

Spelling supports reading

One of the most effective ways of teaching kids decoding is
to
teach it through spelling, through phoneme/grapheme
correspondence
Through spelling, you can teach kids about word origins
Spelling and word meaning are connected
We want children to master the most commonly used words
in
the language at a level of automaticity

When do spelling errors denote a problem?

Individual aptitude for spelling varies. However, poor spelling
is a hallmark of dyslexia. Watch for:
difficulty beginning to emerge from first grade on inability to spell the

highest-frequency words
continued invented spelling even after good instruction and practice
spelling words in a dysphonetic way (with little correspondence between
the sounds that are in a word and the spelling)
inability to remember a letter sequence and difficulty with speech sounds
lack of strategies for thinking about words

When spelling is a problem, it cant be allowed to interfere with

learning to compose, which is a fundamental tool for
academic
success.

Systematic assessment
Assessment is difficult because really good, widely used
tools have not yet been developed.
Best practice is to:
decide on a rubric
talk to kids
organize around explicit expectations

English language learners

Writing and spelling are even more complicated when there
is an overlay of the first language on a second language
Sound-symbol constructions may carry over from first
language to second (e.g., the difference between the
pronunciation of the letter J in English and Spanish)
May learn to fill in the slots of a sentence with correct
spelling without knowing what the words mean

Writing instruction for ELL students

Good instruction for ELLs should include:
dialogue and vocabulary instruction
oral language modeling
oral language expression (saying sentences aloud)
talking about the words
interactive instruction

Differentiated writing instruction

Difficult, but it really makes a difference
Best to work from a common framework for the whole class,
then adapt from this framework for individual students
Need the structure to make the adaptation possible

Teachers as writers
If teachers dont enjoy writing themselves, they will:
shy away from it
provide too few opportunities for students to do it
not evaluate childrens writing carefully
not be able to teach children the characteristics of genre

Why genre is important

The story genre has:
a beginning
challenges
events
a problem and a resolution

When children write a story, teachers should evaluate it

against
the conventions of that genre.

The red pen

Marking all over the page can lead kids to think that writing
is only about capitalization, punctuation, and spelling
Its important for teachers to provide feedback on content
as well. Dig deeper than word count and grammar
Model good writing, so children can learn by example
Focus on both the medium and the message. Discern where
children are doing well or need additional help

VIDEO
Writing Poems
Poe Elementary Houston, Texas

Using a Columbia University program called The Writers Workshop,

second graders learn to become lifelong writers

The program connects literature and writing

It is a structured approach, in which the teacher explicitly teaches
the processes of writing

Tools to encourage creativity

A pleasant environment where kids feel free to take risks
A clear connection between reading and writing (what you
read
can be a model for what you write)
Process = the opportunity to plan, draft, revise, and edit
Opportunities to share writing with peers and teachers

Encouraging young writers

Model the process. The work that goes into writing
planning, drafting, revising, and editing all goes on inside
the mind.
Make it visible to students
Help make handwriting, spelling, and sentence construction
routine (automatized, so students dont have to stop and
think of each word)
Provide grammar and vocabulary instruction

Negative consequences of
poor handwriting and spelling
If you cant read the message, you cant get it
If the message is illegible (because of spelling miscues, for
example) people will devalue what you say
Difficulties in this area interfere with other writing processes

Extra attention to the fundamentals pays off

As a students handwriting improves and their spelling
improves,
there is a carryover effect in:
improved sentence construction
increased amount of writing
increased quality of the writing

How to model sentence formation

Take small, kernel sentences
Show how to make those into more complex sentences
Have kids work with you to do the same thing, then work
with
each other
Have them apply the practice in their own writing

Mechanics versus content

Often interrelated. For example, if you struggle writing the
words youre going to produce less content
If a kid struggles with mechanics, provide focused
instruction in
letter formation and spelling to help kids move past that
point.
Look for alternatives to help the student keep up (e.g., word
processing software, speech synthesis software)
If a kid struggles with content, sometimes its a structure
issue or
a knowledge issue. Instruction should center on how to get
ideas and ways to organize ideas

Writing difficulties
Many children first show difficulties with text transcription
(e.g., handwriting and spelling)
Some kids have self-regulation difficulties which make it
hard to
plan, organize, monitor, and evaluate their own writing
process
Many kids have trouble with both
Overlaying transcription and/or self-regulation issues can be
motivation problems and a persistent reluctance to write

Explicit instruction
Explicit Instruction helps all students those with and
without learning disabilities
Instruction should be explicit about:
Process planning, revising, and helping kids learn to monitor what
theyre doing
Goals why kids are being asked to do the writing assignment and
what they intend to give the reader

How technology can be motivational

The ease with which one can move text
The abatement of transcription difficulties
In searching for ideas for writing

Other effective strategies

Explicitly teach children how to form sentences
Use reading as a model for writing
Have kids do research and ask questions to get ideas for
writing
But nothing beats a well-prepared, knowledgeable,
dedicated
teacher in helping kids become good writers.

Advice for teachers

Teachers will have to self-teach themselves in many aspects of
writing instruction. Some ways to do this:

Take time to write

Join with peers and create a regular time to write and talk about writing
Talk with colleagues and share effective strategies and ideas
Provide time every day to have children write

Is there a specific sequence

of skills children should master?
No fully developed, specific scope and sequence of writing
skills
for all K-12 students exists yet. Each state has its own, and
even districts can differ within a state
Teachers will need to create a sequence for their own
classrooms.
It is critical for teachers to develop a sequence and plan for
how to teach writing
Look at basal readers for ideas

Writing on paper versus writing on the computer

Some kids approach the word processor much like they
approach their written text: Im going to change a little
something here;
Ill try to get this spelling error there. In these cases,
writing on
a computer is very much like writing on a piece of paper
Some kids come at word processing with big ideas. They
make many more revisions upfront and during drafting, than
kids who are writing by hand

Does text messaging have a deleterious impact?

Yes, in a way. It is essentially a different form of language
and communication
It cant replace academic writing skills
Some teachers are using text messaging and the
enthusiasm students have for it as a starting point for
writing, then working with the ideas to transform the writing
into something more formal. This strategy demonstrates
how to switch codes from very
informal to formal

From product to process

Educators originally thought of writing as a product, and
good
writing equaled a lot of text on the paper
Educators then switched to thinking of writing as a process,
focusing on thinking, planning, revising, and editing
Now is the time for a balanced approach, so that the
wonderful process of childrens writing eventually results in
correct form
and good final product

Automaticity is vital
The automatic operations of writing (spelling, grammar,
structure) dont restrict creativity they actually enhance
it.
The key to developing automaticity is a complete program
of instruction. For example, in a 40-minute writing lesson,
devote the first 15 or 20 minutes to skill development and
then the next half to the more creative aspects of writing (of
any kind expository, narrative, poetic, sentence
manipulations)
But we must get away from dichotomous thinking that skills
inhibit creativity. They do not.

Writing is not solely creative

Inevitably, good writing also is informational in nature

Description and accuracy are important and need to be
emphasized

Reading and writing are connected

The National Reading Panel (NRP) brought a sharp focus to
reading and as a result, reading instruction has improved
Separating reading and writing in the NRP report was a
mistake.
We need to bring them back together and help educators
understand the unity of these language functions, their
interrelationships, and common denominators

Writing is all about writing

It is not enough for teachers to post explain expect
(P.E.E: dont do it in the classroom).
Rather, teachers must present and model writing with
students.
Bring students to mastery so they can write well by
themselves
Children have to write in order learn to write. At every grade
level, writing narrative text, expository text, or on topics of
their own choosing, we want them to be excited about
writing

Thank you!

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